When I signed up for my Gmail account, it mentioned that the special invitation would only be on blogger.com for a month. This leads me to believe that it will be at least another month until they open it up to the public. Perhaps June 1st, or maybe they are shooting for an American holiday - like the 4th of July? As far as the dates go though, it's all speculation on my part. They likely haven't announced a date yet because they are still doing tests. I have noticed a couple of glitches, but they seem to be intermittent and not that critical.

Oh if you have any questions about Gmail that you'd like answered, feel free to ask in the comments. I'll do my best to answer them.

Here is something about Gmail you may not have known:
Gmail has the ability to search for your mail based on the following criteria: From, To, Subject, folder, Has the words, Doesn't have, Has Attachment, and Date (within 1 day to 1 year - you set the term).

I noticed that addresses I emailed are automatically added to my contact book. I'm not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand it makes keeping track of any email addresses a snap, but on the other hand I feel like I just gave Google a copy of all my friends and family's email addresses. (Sorry). I can only justify it by telling myself that it was inevitable anyway, because eventually someone somewhere was going to email them from a Gmail account, besides all the people I emailed were already on my hotmail contacts so its not like one more list is really going to hurt, these contact lists that users create for services like hotmail and yahoo mail haven't been abused in the past - that I'm aware of anyway, so let's just hope Google continues the trend.

I do like the fact that when I go to retype an email address that is in my contacts, Gmail brings up the closest spelling match as I type (the same way autocomplete works in your browser). This system is superior though, in that in brings up not just entries that start with same letters you have already typed, but the entries that start with the same letters you have already typed in the order that you email most frequently. It's complicated but I'll let Google's help page explain:

As you prepare to send a message by typing in an email address, Gmail's auto-completion feature suggests names from your Contacts list based on the letters you type. Keystrokes can add up, and this will save you a few seconds every time you send a message. Gmail orders your auto-complete list by frequency so that the addresses you send messages to most frequently appear at the top of your list. If you would like to view a list of your most frequently mailed contacts, click 'Contacts' at the top of any Gmail page, then click 'Frequently Mailed.'